A fossil may rewrite the story of how plants first lived on land
A plant fossil that lay unnoticed for a century is unexpectedly large for something so old, and it could upend our ideas about the evolution of land plants
Oxygen may have helped complex life arise a billion years early
Earth’s air suddenly got a lot more oxygen around 1.6 billion years ago and that could have triggered the evolution of large multicellular organisms
Worst mass extinctions may have been caused by rising mountains
A pair of mass extinctions struck in quick succession just before the dinosaur era, and the birth of a mountain range in South Africa may have been partly to blame
This is the oldest fossil of a plesiosaur from the dinosaur era
A nearly complete skeleton of an early long-necked plesiosaur has been found in a clay pit in Germany, and reveals they survived a mass extinction
What the controversial ‘human’ teeth fossils really tell us
Two 9.7-million-year-old fossil teeth found in Germany probably belong to a primitive primate and something like a deer, not an early human ancestor as has been reported
Geese-like birds seem to have survived the dinosaur extinction
A bird group named the Vegaviidae, which resembled modern loons and geese, is the first identified with members that lived before and after the Cretaceous extinction
Perfectly preserved fossil salamander even has last meal in gut
A fossil salamander that lived at least 34 million years ago is in such good condition that the remains of a frog it ate are still in its digestive tract